Gender, Religion, and Sexual Permissiveness: Some Recent Australian Data

Summary

A six-item questionnaire on sexual permissiveness was administered to 560 college students. Data were examined for effect of the gender and church attendance variables. For all categories of analysis, while prevailing attitudes towards extramarital relations remained restrictive, increasingly liberal attitudes to premarital permissiveness were demonstrated when compared with earlier Australian studies. There were significant differences between the sexes on only the issue of extramarital permissiveness; an inverse relationship between church attendance and permissiveness was found for both the premarital and extramarital situation. Two widely recognized models, differential socialization and cohort-wide values, are useful in interpreting these intercategory variations and should be utilized according to their degree of applicability.